


Love is for Children

by ClawR



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Drunken Confessions, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Intoxication, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, POV Female Character, Past Abuse, although once again "comfort" is probably the wrong word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-22
Updated: 2012-07-22
Packaged: 2017-11-10 11:34:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClawR/pseuds/ClawR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Given any six people talking about their virginity, the odds are in favor of one of them having had a traumatic experience.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>One night, when they've all had a little too much to drink, Tony tells the Avengers something he probably would rather have kept secret. Or: Natasha thinks about sex and gender and power for nine pages.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love is for Children

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/5102.html?thread=4680942#t4680942) at avengerkink.

Natasha is an expert in many areas – hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, disguise – but if she had to pick one thing about which to say, “No question, I’m the best in the world,” it would be men.

Clint or Fury or Hill would probably say “seduction,” or more likely, “manipulation.” Natasha says that too, out loud. But privately, she knows that her real talent is understanding men. It doesn’t matter if he’s a Russian mobster or a Norse god: Natasha can take one look at a man and see what he wants her to be. See what will make him trust her, underestimate her, revere her. See which of those things will make him talk.

It’s a gift.

Natasha surveys the men before her: Thor, Rogers, Bruce, Stark. She skips Clint, because one of their iron-clad unspoken rules is “no fucking with each other’s heads,” and the safest way to avoid manipulating someone is to not think about how to. It’s a rare Avengers meet-up, held because Thor’s in town for once. They’ve taken over several floors of Stark Tower, but no one is in their guest room now, even though it’s almost two in the morning. The whole team is in the kitchen, trading war stories as they work on drying up Stark’s truly impressive liquor supply.

Thor, with no deceit in him, Thor who would reveal any secret to a woman who fought beside him, holds court at the table, chugging yuppie microbrews like they’re Natty Light.

Rogers, level-headed, with so much power and no desire to hold it over you, who would have to love you before he confided in you, sits at Thor’s side, sipping water and listening attentively to his story. They’re a pair, the two of them: the only soldiers in the bunch.

Bruce, more armored than any of them, Bruce who keeps himself locked down and out of the way, Bruce who would give you the key to himself, but only if he believed you were in desperate danger and only he could save you, Bruce sits on the counter by the sink, swinging his legs and drinking Scotch with fewer and fewer rocks as the night wears on.

Stark, with something to prove, with everything to prove, who would give up any secret if he thought it would win him the game, slumps on the floor at Bruce’s feet, drunk on frothy, fruity cocktails.

Clint and Natasha lean against the wall by the door. Clint is working on his third gin and tonic. Natasha nurses a glass of authentic Russian potato vodka, the kind where you can actually taste the potato. There’s an off-chance that Stark stocked up on it just for her. He can be like that: quietly generous and thoughtful, when the mood takes him.

Thor’s story – about an Asgardian maiden he’d rescued from some kind of Asgardian monster – is longer than it needs to be, but it’s winding down, now.

“I returned with her to her home in the city,” Thor says. “And she…”

“She what?” Steve asks.

Thor coughs. “She…”

Tony perks up. “You guys did it, didn’t you?”

“Well, we did…” Thor trails off again. He twists the cap off of a new bottle of beer – no, it’s not a twist-off cap – and drinks the whole thing in one gulp. Rogers watches him with a kind of fascination.

“You got thank-you-for-saving-my-life sex!” Tony says. “You’re a hero to us all.”

Bruce chuckles silently, just a hitch of his chest, almost a hiccough.

“We did lie together, but not in gratitude,” Thor says, having finished his beer. “We had bonded, through our trials. She was my first love, and my first lover.”

“That’s lovely,” Bruce says. Tony tries to thwack him on the leg, misses, and slams his knuckles against the counter instead. Clint, who has a sadistic streak and a weakness for slapstick, doubles over laughing.

Tony blows a raspberry at him. “Well, how’d you pop _your_ cherry, Man-in-Tights?”

Man-in-Tights. That’s a new one. Natasha wonders what it’s a reference to.

“Ah, what a story,” Clint says, his eyes far away. “I was twenty, and she was an acrobat. The things that woman could do with her legs…”

Natasha snorts. Clint’s first time was with an audience member after a show. It had been, according to him, hilariously bad.

“Did he lie?” Tony asks. “You lied, didn’t you?”

Clint smirks, and Rogers throws a crumpled-up paper towel at him for his trouble.

“Hey! What was that for?”

“Lying to your teammates,” Rogers says, so primly that he has to be putting it on.

“All right then,” Clint says. “What was Captain America’s first time like?”

Natasha could have told him not to bother. She can pick out a virgin like Clint can pick out a target, and sure enough, Steve blushes and sets his empty water glass spinning on the granite tabletop.

“I haven’t yet,” he says.

“Seriously?” Tony says. “You’re like, what, a hundred years old? What are you waiting for?”

Bruce swings his legs a touch too far to the left and kicks Stark in the head. “Oops.”

“I’m waiting for the right girl,” Rogers says.

“I think that’s sweet,” Natasha says. 

She’s only partly joking, but Rogers must think she’s ganging up on him with Stark, because he turns the tables on her. “What about your first time, Natasha? Was it sweet?”

Everyone except Clint suddenly looks extremely interested in something else. Even Rogers seems to wish he could take back what he said. They’re all worried that her first time was traumatic somehow, and while it’s not a terrible assumption, it’s wrong.

Natasha has two first-time stories: the real one, and the one the Russian government implanted in her head. She compromises and tells them something that’s true of both.

“It was,” she says, grinning. “I was seventeen. He was pretty.”

The tension breaks, and everyone laughs.

“Does that make you the youngest, then?” Clint asks. “I mean, I assume Thor was already like a millennium old or something, for his.”

“I was fifteen,” Bruce says. He sighs and smiles like he’s just come in from the cold and put on a pair of warm slippers. Beside her, Clint taps his index finger against his glass, a nervous tic, but Natasha can see that Bruce treasures this memory.

Bruce gropes for the bottle of Scotch on the counter and refills his glass. “Ellen Harold. She was my first girlfriend. The night of the Homecoming dance. We were both terrible, of course.” He says “terrible” like he means “beloved.”

“Young, perhaps,” Thor says, “But meaningful.” He raises a bottle – his twelfth, by Natasha’s count – and drinks deeply.

“You think that’s young,” Stark says, too loudly, and Natasha knows what’s coming next. She rarely has charitable impulses, but she wants to go over to Stark now, push the words back into his mouth, tell him his eyelids are drooping and his tie is dangling into his drink and he’ll regret this in the morning.

“I’ve got you all beat,” Stark slurs. “I was twelve.”

It’s like someone sucked the air out of the room. Stark is magnetic; no one can look away.

“Seriously?” Bruce says.

Stark – who must be really drunk, because usually he reads situations better than this – is oblivious to the tension. “Yup. I win!” He raises his glass, and the tip of his tie falls out, spraying apricot brandy and orange curacao across the floor. “Oops.”

“What…” Rogers clears his throat. “What happened?”

If Natasha were a better person, she would interrupt. What good will it do Stark to talk about this? What good can possibly come of drunkenly reopening a thirty-year-old wound?

Why, for that matter, is everyone so surprised? Given any six people talking about their virginity, the odds are in favor of one of them having had a traumatic experience. And if Natasha had had to put money on which of the six it was, she’d have bet on Stark in a second. He’s the one with something to prove. Stark’s story is sad; it’s not surprising. And it’s not worth prying out of him.

Too late. “She was my English teacher,” Stark says, rolling his head back and forth along the cabinet door behind him. “Miss Mason. She used to do this _thing_ with her tongue. I’ve never been able to find someone else who could do it.” He smirks, or at least he thinks he’s smirking. Mostly his lips stretch out and his eyelid kind of twitches.

“Tony,” Bruce says.” His feet have stopped swinging, and he leans forward at a dangerous angle, trying to get a look at Stark’s face. “Did you ever tell anyone?”

Stark finally realizes that he’s not on the same wavelength as everyone else. He pushes himself up straighter, scrabbling against the tile floor. “No, it wasn’t like that. She didn’t force me or anything. It was consenushal. Consent… Consensual.” He giggles.

Clint’s finger tap-tap-taps against his glass. Rogers has one hand on the zipper of his jacket, jerking it up and down. Thor spins a bottle cap on the table until he loses control of it and it flies onto the floor. Bruce’s knuckles glow white where he grips the edge of the counter too tightly.

Natasha doesn’t twitch. Natasha only watches. She knows that she doesn’t have the same attitude toward sex that most people do. To Natasha, sex is a versatile thing; it changes shape with use. Sex can be a tool, a distraction, a currency. Natasha has used it as all these things, and she is not ashamed. Sex is power, and Natasha has always harnessed _it_ , but of course it works the other way too. Sex can be terribly intimate. Sex can be a gift; sex can be a weapon.

To Tony Stark, sex is a challenge.

“It wasn’t consensual,” Natasha says. If the wound must be reopened, it can at least be cleaned in the process.

Stark’s head jerks toward her, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “It’s a guy thing.”

The balled-up paper towel Rogers threw at Clint earlier lies a few inches from Natasha’s feet. She scoops it up and whips it at Stark, faster than he could react even if he were sober. It bounces off his forehead and lands in his glass.

“ _What_?”

“I understand perfectly,” Natasha says. “Being a guy has nothing to do with it.”

“Sure it does. You can’t rape the willing.” Stark throws his arms out to the side, as if he’s just said _Ta-da!_

This is the lie that Stark has told himself for thirty years: That he consented. That he wanted it. Better that than admitting he was ever powerless. It’s an attractive lie, one with a lot of societal pressure backing it up, and it might be kinder to let Stark go on telling it. Certainly, it would be easier. But Stark’s eyes are rimmed with red, and he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and an unconvincing lie will do more damage than the truth.

“You weren’t willing,” Natasha says. “You were twelve.”

Stark looks from face to face and finds no allies. “God, you guys know how to take the fun out of things. I’m going to bed. Wake me up when you stop being pissed that I beat you.” He stands, using the edge of the counter to pull himself up, and stumbles out of the room.

Rogers stares after him. “Should we…”

“Let him go,” Bruce says. “Drunken catharsis never lasts, anyway.”

But Rogers can’t let it go completely. “JARVIS,” he says, “where did Stark go to school?”

“Cantor Academy, sir,” JARVIS’ cool, disembodied voice answers.

“There was an English teacher there. Last name Mason.”

“I have already run a search for Mr. Stark,” JARVIS says. “Henrietta Mason died of lung cancer in 1996.”

“Was it painful?” Clint asks. Apparently, JARVIS understands rhetorical questions, because there’s no answer.

Everyone sort of stares at their drinks for a while. “I still don’t fully understand human aging,” Thor says.

“Twelve is young,” Bruce says. “Too young.”

“What do we do?” Rogers asks.

“Nothing,” Bruce says. “We let him come to us.”

Stark does not come to them. He spends the next day in his workshop, and reemerges the day after as if nothing happened. He doesn’t bring up what he told them, and neither does anyone else. In the harsh clarity of daylight and sobriety, it’s unthinkable.

Doing unthinkable things is part of Natasha’s job description. Three days post-revelation, she corners Stark in the kitchen.

“Natasha!” he says, and waves a mug in her face. “Coffee? You know, I was just thinking about when you used to be my assistant. And then when you were Pepper’s. You were the best assistant Pepper ever had. Granted, she only ever had the one.”

Natasha rolls her eyes as conspicuously as she can. “Stark,” she says.

Stark must sense what she wants to talk about, because he suddenly gets ten times as irritating. “You ever think about giving up the superhero business and going professional with the secretary gig?”

Natasha takes his mug from him and sets it on the counter. “Stark, shut up. I want you to hear this while you’re sober.”

She watches Stark fidget, sizing up the situation, sees the moment that _he_ sees she means business. He wilts like a helium balloon the day after a party. Picks a spot on the wall over her head and stares at it. “Go ahead.”

The lack of eye contact doesn’t bother Natasha. Stark knows that if she’s gone to the trouble of seeking him out, she means what she’s saying.

“You weren’t willing,” she says. “You were too young to consent.”

Stark crosses his arms across his chest and bores a hole in the wall with his eyes.

“There’s an upside to that, though,” Natasha continues. “ _It wasn’t your fault_.”

Stark swallows. “If you say so,” he says, and leaves, his coffee forgotten.

Natasha can make any man in the world tell her the truth. Getting him to accept it is harder. But Stark has a history of changing his mind. Natasha watches him walk away and thinks, _Maybe_.


End file.
